Oh my gosh, the last few days at work have been awful. I’ve
had to be 100% on top of my game, and it’s been so much work that I haven’t had
much time at all to think about our TTC problems.
Anyway, the doctor’s office tried calling on Thursday, but I
couldn’t get to my phone all day. Then they tried again on Friday, but it was
another day where I had not a moment to breathe (or even eat) so I missed them
again. Saturday I left them a voice mail, but they were closed. So Monday I
finally forced a moment into the end of my day so I could touch base with
them. All the while, I kept taking the
same birth control.
So they said they wanted me to do another trigger shot, in
the hopes that it would clear out the huge follicle-remnant that is preventing us
from being able to proceed with TTC. The good news: they found a pharmacy that
charged $80 for the shot, as opposed to the $168 I paid last time. The bad news: It’s an hour and a
half drive from my work, and they close at 5:30.
So I came into work yesterday early so I could leave at 4.
Drove to the pharmacy (which is downtown, so parking’s a pain) and picked up
the shot – the lady there was SO NICE and put it in an ice pack for me – and then
drove all the way back across town to Golden to pick Kaitlin up from her car
repair place. Was so tired and hungry by then that we stopped at an Indian
restaurant for dinner. Then I went home,
Kaitlin gave me the shot, and I pretty much just crashed.
Now I’m to continue to take the birth control for the next
two weeks, and have another ultrasound appointment on April 8th. Really, really hoping we can move forward
with another TTC cycle by then. God, I thought the TWW was hard. This has been
a two MONTH wait. So agonizing I’ve actually HAD to stop thinking about it,
because it was just becoming intolerable to be so frustrated all the time.
Basically, it has been a really stressful week. Some of that
stress, I know I’m creating for myself. We had a whole leadership team meeting
at work this morning that talked a lot about stress and dealing with it
productively and not making it worse than it is. One of the handouts pointed
out that stress comes from a DIRE need for success and/or others’ approval. I
started thinking about that and realized: what I have a “dire” need for is a
sense of safety. That’s really the most driving force in my life – I feel like
I can’t even dare to have dreams if the plans I make to achieve them are
constantly pulled out from under me. But, I strongly connect safety with others
thinking well of me. The more influence another person has on a key area of my
life (like my job…), the more important it is that they don’t think poorly of
me, and the more endangered I feel if it seems like they might. And THAT, in
turn, leads me to hate making mistakes so much that I end up responding
emotionally and overreacting to correct them – either by withdrawing and trying
to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, or coming up with some massive detailed
time-sucking project to ensure that mistake never happens again.
I also realize this annoys my boss, a lot. She wants me to
let go of mistakes easier (but that doesn’t mean she’s able to not-call-me-out
on them when I make them.) And, I think she feels like I need a lot of
reassurance all the time. I don’t WANT to be the kind of person who needs a lot
of reassurance, but again that’s mostly because I don’t want others to feel
burdened by me (and therefore think poorly of me) because that threatens my
sense of safety…. See what a conundrum it is?
Also, if I’m being honest– most of this stuff is really only
important to me because it’s important to my boss, who is directly in charge of
evaluating my performance and providing my ongoing employment. If my boss didn’t
care about mistakes I wouldn’t either. If my boss didn’t care whether our
clients were happy I wouldn’t either. If my boss didn’t push for improvement
and growth and change, I wouldn’t either. Because I am, at heart, a very
selfish person. I don’t really care about doing a good job. All I really want
is to know that *I’m* safe. If safety is contingent on doing a good job, then I
have to care about it and I will. But it really isn’t work quality that motivates
me, it’s the risk that poor quality work places to my job security and therefore
my financial security. And of course, to complete the paradox, being honest
about having these values only serves to make one’s employer more concerned/disapproving,
thereby increasing the security risk. And, comfortably accepting this about
myself prevents me from demonstrating growth and improvement, which also
increases the risk–especially when your employer has the expectation that good will
never be satisfactory if better is possible.
I’ll never actually solve this problem. I think my entire
life/career will be spent constantly struggling to find a balance between
avoiding mistakes and shrugging them off. The primary motivation for finding
that balance is, again, a sense of security… because ultimately either extreme
puts me at risk. And occasional failure is inevitable, and that’s a really
frustrating reality to accept. In life, things will go wrong. Shit will happen
no matter how well you prepare or how well you minimize the risks. What all of
this amounts to is a complicated complaint that I can’t be both safe and
comfortable; or: Life Isn’t Always Fair. It’s sucky, but wallowing in the
suckiness only makes it suckier. So put on your Big Girl Panties and deal with it,
I guess, yeah?
This is probably way too much thinking for a Wednesday morning.
:P
Going tonight to pick up a birth control refill. In the
meantime, going to try and clear some of this work off of my desk… It’s one
thing I CAN do to actively start reducing at least a portion of this stress.
Isn’t being a grownup fun?!~
No comments:
Post a Comment